Arch Linux

dantakka

Member

Registered: 2018-03-25

Posts: 11

[SOLVED] Volume issues with PulseAudio

Hello,

From yesterday I am experiencing issues with PulseAudio. I have installed PulseAudio together with pamixer to control my system's audio. Everything was working great for an year now with zero issues. But yesterday after a reboot I noticed that I didn't have any audio. I had not upgraded the system for more than 2 weeks, so I really don't know how it broke all of a sudden.

I followed the PulseAudio/Troubleshooting page from ArchWiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pu … ing#Volume) with no success. When I check to see if the pulseaudio.service is loaded it returns:

$ systemctl --user status pulseaudio.service
● pulseaudio.service - Sound Service
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/pulseaudio.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Sun 2018-05-13 18:58:39 EEST; 12min ago
 Main PID: 5171 (pulseaudio)
   CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/pulseaudio.service
           └─5171 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no

May 13 18:58:39 localhost systemd[1013]: Starting Sound Service...
May 13 18:58:39 localhost systemd[1013]: Started Sound Service.

When I attempt to restart PulseAudio, as stated in the PulseAudio/Troubleshooting page, by executing:

$ pulseaudio -k
$ pulseaudio --start
E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon startup failed.

I noticed that after I tried to restart PulseAudio the following lines appeared in journalctl:

May 13 19:13:05 localhost pulseaudio[11147]: bind(): Address already in use
May 13 19:13:05 localhost pulseaudio[11147]: Failed to load module "module-native-protocol-unix" (argument: ""): initialization failed.
May 13 19:13:05 localhost pulseaudio[11147]: Module load failed.
May 13 19:13:05 localhost pulseaudio[11147]: Failed to initialize daemon.

As I said I hadn't upgraded my system when the issues with PulseAudio appeared. I upgraded my system today with no issues, but I still don't have volume with PulseAudio. What could've caused this?
Thank you!

Last edited by dantakka (2018-05-13 18:54:37)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,738

Re: [SOLVED] Volume issues with PulseAudio

Post

sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*
aplay -l
amixer -c$cardindex from aplay -l$
pacmd list-cards
pacmd list-sinks
pacmd list-sink-inputs

during playback.

You should also fix your hostname as leaving it on localhost might cause all sorts of issues.

dantakka

Member

Registered: 2018-03-25

Posts: 11

Re: [SOLVED] Volume issues with PulseAudio

Post

sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*
aplay -l
amixer -c$cardindex from aplay -l$
pacmd list-cards
pacmd list-sinks
pacmd list-sink-inputs

during playback.

You should also fix your hostname as leaving it on localhost might cause all sorts of issues.

As I was executing these commands, suddenly I noticed that the issues had disappeared and PulseAudio was working great. Then I restarted my machine and noticed that the issues reappeared again.

After some troubleshooting I noticed that I had my music player Audacious to start automatically after I login, so I don't have to start it every time manually. When I checked the settings of the player I noticed that the output plugin has changed to 'ALSA Output', instead of 'PulseAudio Output'. When I changed it back to PulseAudio everything was working flawless, without any issues. When I returned it to 'ALSA Output' to see if that was the problem it returns:

ALSA error: snd_pcm_open failed: Device or resource busy.

Thank you for your help. I will for sure change my hostname too.

Last edited by dantakka (2018-06-04 11:42:43)